[Help] How to make Water/Ice/Bubble Effects?

[Midday-Mew]

How do I sprite water/ice/bubble effects? Like, how do I shade a bubble, or sprite a bubble being popped, or draw/sprite water effects, or draw/sprite ice effects? I don't get it....I see people make awesome artworks of water/ice/bubble effects all the time and I've never been able to figure it out. Fire effects I understand, same with electricity. Clouds aren't hard to make for me (though I only know how to do cumulus or cumulonimbus clouds....) and I sort of understand how to make tornados (kinda, but I'm still rough on that), though how to do wind escapes me, so I guess I don't have the air element downpat... Though admittedly I can't sprite rock or stone that well, same with sand, so the earth element is hard for me to figure out too...How do I sprite those things?

The issue here is that I don't want to "steal" other people's styles of making water/ice/bubble effects, I want to make my own style of it. But I don't know how to do it without copying what other people have done. Which is "stealing" their styles, isn't it? It's not going to teach me anything.

And the style I want to go for is a cartoony one.

Help?

Here are some samples of what I've done with water/ice/bubble effects. Look how horrid they look, and how much more work I need to put into them.

Ice:



I've never done effects that look like "ice energy radiating off of ______". I also haven't figured out how to properly do "_______ frozen in ice" or even "ice crystals".

Water:

This one isn't a sprite, but....it's old, I guess? Probably goes as far back as 2007. Maybe 2010? Definitely no later than that. ....And looking it up, it dates back to early 2010.


Only thing I did that was water, unless bubbles count. I tried to do rain at a grassy field...Yeah, I can't do grass either. I was trying to follow a tutorial for rain and....that didn't work out. If the VGR staff/mods/admins want me to remove this pic because it isn't a sprite, I shall.

I also can't figure out how to do stuff like water splashes, geysers, waterfalls, water currents, etc.

Bubbles:

Here's the latest I've done with bubbles....



If these images aren't large enough to properly view, just let me know and I'll enlarge them.